A history of medicine

nervus ophthalmicus Willisii, nervus accessorium Willisii and the otological symptom, par(wacsis Willisii. But Hughes probes much further than merely tracing the etymology of these eponyms. Willis's family, teachers, colleagues and pupils are chronologically paraded past the reader's view in five early chapters. Additionally, Hughes, a neuropathologist, devotes four chapters to a survey of Willis's medical writings, focusing primarily upon his "contribution to Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology". And as a helpful guide for supplementary information about Willis, Hughes has compiled an extensive thirteen-page bibliography. Although painstakingly accurate in detail, Hughes is prone to overstatement and laudatory comment, especially when describing the family, friends, and fellows of Willis's acquaintance. Rather than pinpointing Willis's precise affiliations with his contemporaries, the author seems to be content with speculating about Willis's associations with the frequent use of statements such as "but must have known of' or "might have encouraged" a particular Restoration figure. Allusions to Willis's Royalist leanings as a contributing factor to his reversal of fortune are most disappointing. This reader believes Hughes could have more accurately contextualized Willis's relationship to, or reliance upon Charles II by drawing upon some recent scholarship of the Restoration monarch, especially that of Ronald Hutton. Indeed, all the chapters of this work show a marked unawareness of the historical scholarship written during the past few decades. Readers will also encounter the occasional anachronistic wanderings such as "here Willis speaks as a twentieth[-]century pharmacologist rather than one 300 years earlier" (p. 79). Despite general Whiggish historiographical shortcomings, Hughes's brief synopses offer the most concise yet complete account of Willis's seven medical publications to date. To use the words of a commentator on Willis, J. Trevor Hughes has become a "gifted gatherer of data". His data have been gathered into a useful ready reference filled with details, illustrations, and synopses about the life and work of this "Great Doctor" in English medical history. It is a commonplace and richly warranted complaint among those who teach survey courses on the history of medicine that we have no historiographically up-to-date textbook introducing the field. Lois Magner seeks to fill this gap with A history qf medic-inte, a serious work of synthesis that explores themes in western medicine from classical antiquity to the present and offers several chapters on non-western traditions. The writing is engaging, and the author recognizes the pedagogic value of relating past to present (tapping into contemporary fascination with AIDS, for …